Princess Diana is the poster child of seat belts. At 100 mph the only survivor of the impact was the passenger in the front seat who shared space with the engine.
Sometimes as in < 0? then yes
You’re half right. Wikipedia says:
Snopeslists several data sources which conclude that seat belts decrease the risk of serious or fatal injury 40-55 percent.
I was told the following by an ER trauma team when my daughter was in a serious accident earlier this year. (The car she was a passenger in left the road, hit a tree, then hit a house. Both she and the driver were unconscious at the scene and had to be cut from the car. Both survived.): Many people who survive serious MVAs have broken clavicles and/or pelvic fractures, which are generally caused by the force of the seatbelt holding their body back. It’s true that the seat belts cause those accidents, but without the seatbelt, the same amount of force applied to your skull or chest is almost always fatal.
I’m sure there are case where the lack of a seat belt helps someone escape a burning/sinking car. But I’m also sure that for every such case, there are 100,000 cases of a person without a seatbelt being killed in an otherwise survivable accident. As a reporter, I often write news briefs about fatal car accidents. You wouldn’t believe how many times I wrote about how one passenger not wearing a seatbelt and was killed while the other person in the car was wearing a seatbelt was not seriously injured.
Anecdotal, but a seatbelt killed a friend of mine. He was a year behind me in school. After I’d gone off to college, he was driving back from a basketball away game. The road he took runs through a swamp, with relatively deep canals on either side of a two-lane highway. I think two other boys were with him. Something happened, and the car ended up inverted and under water. The other guys got out, but Jeff was unable to release his seatbelt. They tried to get Jeff out, but couldn’t do it in time. Cause of death was drowning. Had he not worn the seatbelt, maybe he’d be alive today.
I think about that wreck every time I drive that highway, or any of many similar ones in that part of the world. I think what happened to Jeff was some kind of a one in a million “perfect storm” where everything just happened to come together in the worst possible way for him…but maybe there should be an exception to seatbelt laws for those particular highways where there is water on both sides of the road. Let the driver choose whatever he’s comfortable with there.
Still, as a gambling man, I think I’d probably bet on the seatbelt.
The only place I’m aware of where drivers are required to NOT wear a seat belt are the northern ice roads, because if a truck starts to go through the ice the driver needs to leave as quickly as possible. For that reason they also drive with unlocked doors.
Perhaps I should point out that speeds on those roads are incredibly low as well?
Anyhow - I have a friend who’s van was hit by a train (a freak accident involving a signal malfunction and obstructed sight lines) and, not wearing a seat belt, he was thrown free. Yes, probably,he would have been killed had he been belted in as the van was run over and cut up by a train. On the downside, he had severe internal injuries a dozen broken major bones, and (relatively) minor brain injury, and things were touch and go for a couple months.
But I still wear my seatbelt.
I knew a guy who claimed to be in the “would be dead if wearing a seatbelt” category. Can’t remember the details, but it involved having to get out of the seat immediately and making it by inches. Which, hey, is possible.
What annoyed me beyond belief was that he refused to wear a seatbelt afterwards, despite being aware that, in most accidents, the belt is vastly preferential. It was like a guy who won the lottery, and then kept buying tickets.
I believe that’s common when you go ice fishing as well. As soon as you get onto the ice you take off your seat belt, unlock the doors and roll down the windows (so you can hear the ice cracking). I thought I heard one person add in that they take off their shoes as well. But I might be making that up. I remember in high school we had to jump in to the pool fully clothed to simulate falling out of a boat/off a dock and the first thing to do was take your shoes off since it’s so hard to swim with them on.
It IS known that the seat belt CAN sever the neck of younger passengers where the shoulder strap rubs against the neck. (It can probably happen to an adult, too.) I personally know of one case where a child was killed by a seat belt in this fashion, but I do not know the details other than it was PRIOR to car seat/booster seat companies emphasizing proper seat belt placement - often by use of an additional little plastic piece that attaches to the shoulder strap (harness). Now, just how good are these little things? I seriously wonder as they “float” around as your kid squirms in his/her seat. (The industry could have made the thing to have a more tenacious hold on the seat belt!)
Also, it is possible this dogma relates to an older generation of backseat seatbelts which once lacked a shoulder harness. “They” actually said you were safer without wearing the lapbelt which could leave you paralyzed as opposed to (supposedly) being pressed against the back of the seat before you. However, I do not know who “they” were when this was the conventional wisdom.
So, yes OP, we can conclude a seat belt can kill - an unsuspecting child, no less. But, good luck chancing the the odds of not wearing one.
I wonder what the fatality rates for those killed whilst wearing seat belts would also have been killed if they had not been wearing them.
Some crashes are not survivable at all, and I am willing to bet those who died wearing seatblets were mostly victims of such incidents.
I wonder what the chances are of being trapped in a sinking car, with full mobility that even gave the victim any hope at all of getting out, because wearing that seatbelt probably protected that mobility.
I saw a segment many years ago on 60 Minutes of a similar program, where they explained (with video) that school buses didn’t have lap belts because crash tests had shown that having just a lap belt increased kids’ chances of hurting their head on the hard back of the seat in front of them. Apparently it was statistically safer to not wear any belt at all. They didn’t discuss the possibility of having shoulder belts installed.
Are school buses still devoid of seat belts? I haven’t ridden in one since the last century.
Not typical but no seatbelt…
I flipped a van end to end down a busy highway and against a guardrail. During this my door was ripped off, I was thrown 110’ and landed on the highway. This was measured by a highway patrol officer that was chasing the car that hit me.
The steering wheel crushed my seat. I spent a week in the hospital for severe bruising.
The officer came to visit me in the hospital and told me what happened, he was amazed.
In New Hampshire, adults are not required to wear a seatbelt.
Well… I guess I misread you. I think you’re saying those drivers are not permitted to wear a seatbelt.
Even so, I think NH is the only US state where seatbelts are optional.
Yes. Every so often there will be a bus accident that involves a fatality (there was one in my hometown last spring) and it will renew discussion of requiring seatbelts, but nothing ever seems to come of it.
School buses are generally designed to be safe for kids not wearing a seat belt. That is why they have those high fronts and backs, to help protect the child in case of a sudden stop. The child will not go flying through the bus, through a windshield etc, as may happen in a passenger car. The real danger in wearing seat belts on a bus is the unfavorable child:driver ratio. In an emergency in which all the kids need to be evacuated (water, fire etc) one driver would have to race around the bus trying to unbuckle each child. This is especially true for younger kids or kids who were hurt and could not unbuckles themselves.
ETA: I was a huge proponent of school bus seat belts, until I started reading the actual research on it and changed my mind.
I don’t have a statistic at hand, but have heard it mentioned from different emergency responders (maybe even in that Mythbusters segment on how to escape a sinking car?) that if you end up in water after a crash, you still have much better chances with a seatbelt, because your chances of being awake and only lightly hurt - and therefore able to get out at all - are much better with seatbelt vs. without.
The main problem in sinking cars is not the seatbelt, but acting quickly enough to open the window to counter the water pressure.
And the secondary effects of collison - the German ADAC has only recently started testing cars for this, noting that in a real-life crash, as opposed to the Euro tests they are usually doing, quite a high number of cars are crashed badly in secondary collisions. That is, the car hits the main obstacle, bounces off or plowes it aside, and then collides with something else - another car, a tree,… - or rolls down an embankment, flipping over etc.
Since research so far was concerned with meeting the standards of the Eurostar standarized crash test, all the crumple zones, airbags etc. are used up in the main first collision, but no thought had been spend on making sure the car doesn’t bounce around further. So now a new direction of research needs to start.
The first part is right, but what do you mean “designed to not slash people thrown through it”? A broken windshield will slash you up like any glass. The safety feature is that it won’t fall apart and come in on the driver during an accident, being thrown through the windshield isn’t part of it. I think the windshield might be the worse window to be thrown out of because it stays intact and shreds you from head to toe while you pass through whatever hole you make, whereas a side window will shatter and go out with you.
Considering the size of a human and the size of a windshield, I think a person being thrown through it is more likely to take out the entire windshield in a piece, than to make a person-shaped hole through the glass.
I remember hearing the excuses when the seat belt laws were being debated. EVERYONE knew someone who would have been killed had they been wearing a seat belt. Also the old guys with the army crew cuts would sit around smoking Camel non-filters and tell hellish stories of people being trapped in fires and underwater and died because the seat belt “jammed.”
The real problem, they claim was that all these Japanese car are made of “cheap plastic” and that the old-fashioned 'Merican cars were built to take an impact. Every time I heard this I explained to them that yes, those old cars did look pretty after an accident, because all of the energy was transferred to the people inside who were all dead. The new cars look horrific after the accident because it absorbs the impact letting the passengers survive.
The old guys would tell me to quit listening to the bullshit they teach me in school and light his next Camel (which wasn’t bad for you because I knew a guy who’s uncle smoked his whole life and lived to be 115 and that was more bullshit they were teaching me in school) *sigh
My job provides access to a very large number of accident reports. Without a doubt, you’re much better off wearing a seatbelt than not. I see reports all the time where a vehicle rolls and an occupant is ejected and killed, yet another passenger in the car was belted and lived. Hell, a few weeks ago there was a rollover wreck with three fatalities. All three were ejected. The fourth passenger was belted and suffered minor injuries.
Generally, when the wreck is bad enough to kill a belted passenger, it’s pretty damn bad. Yes, it’s possible to survive a wreck after being ejected, but your odds of surviving are far, far, far better if you’re belted in.
I just thought that the toughness of the windscreen/shield would crack your skull and kill you before you had a chance to pass through and be cut to pieces. Just going on what I think I remember of those demonstrations where the fire brigade cut open cars for the public.
Dad and I often wondered that when we caught that ice truckers show. We weren’t sure if it would make a difference if the ice went all of a sudden.